RICHARD RUSK: Okay, Pop. DEAN RUSK: Where were we getting back-- RICHARD RUSK: Talking about the Truman administration. DEAN RUSK: Getting back to the days of official life, this checklist of questions that have to be asked in connection with any serious policy question. The first question on that list is what is the question. Now, back in the Truman administration, the question came up as to whether the officers and staff of the United Nations [U.N.] would have to have the approval of their own governments before they could be employed at the U.N. Well, at that time, we were looking toward a genuinely international civil service, and also there were some people who had worked in the League of Nations before World War II, who seemed to be good prospects to take on reasonably important jobs in the United Nations. And some of them were nationals of countries which had had a radical change in government and might not get national approval. And so we felt that the Secretary General of the U.N. ought to be able to appoint officers and staff to the Secretariat without the approval of the national governments involved, so our answer to that question in those days was "no." Then during the [Dwight David] Eisenhower Administration, the question was turned around, and it got to be, "Do we want Americans working for the United Nations who could not pass a loyalty and security test in their own government?" And after the [Joseph Raymond] McCarthy period and all that, the answer to that seemed to be "no." And so we--that is the Eisenhower Administration--informed the Secretary General of the U.N. that we wanted to have clearances on anybody, any American, who was being named to the Secretariat. I am told--I can't verify this--that Dag [Hjalmar Agne Carl] Hammarskjold, who was then the Secretary General, smiled and said, "Well I've been waiting for this, because almost every other member of the United Nations has long since told me that they wanted the same thing." So now, one has to take for granted that anyone who is appointed to the United Nations staff has to have the approval of his own national government, which is a little setback for the idea of a genuinely international civil service. But "what is the question" is the first question on our list. The next, right behind it, is the question "whose question is it?" Is it something that the United States ought to be concerned about? Or is it something that we just leave to those who are involved? Now, that is not as easy as it sounds, because you've got a very active press there in Washington and they're very likely to ask you at a press conference or whatever chance they get, "What do you think about what's happened in so-and-so?" Well, if you say, "Well we don't think anything about it. It's not our problem," they'll go off and ooh and aah about that. But if you express an opinion about it then you can be sure that the very next question is, "Then what are you going to do about it?" So, if you know ahead of time that you're not going to do anything about it, you have to be careful about what you say about it. But there are a lot of questions that come up that are simply not ours. For example, during the sixties, Britain and Spain got into another round of argument about Gibraltar. And each one of them came to us and asked to take their view on the issue of Gibraltar. And I said to each one of them "Now look, both Great Britain and Spain had diplomacy long before the United States was born. Now we have nothing to do with how the Gibraltar situation developed. Now just go away. We're not going to take any part in it. We're not going to express any view, take any hand in it at all." And both of them were irritated because they wanted us to. Each one of them wanted us to side with them on that particular dispute, you see. You see, influence on American policy is one of the primary objects of most foreign policies for foreign offices in the world. And you have to go through the process of deciding whether its something we ought to get into anyhow, in any way, shape, or form. Now, there are certain general rules that apply in almost any of these things, and that is that we much prefer to see disputes settled by peaceful means than by violence, things like that. But, again, you have that long checklist to go through before you find yourself coming to a conclusion or policy. But very often doing nothing is the right action to take. But you have to be careful that if you do nothing it is on purpose and not through delay, procrastination, neglect, things of that sort. RICHARD RUSK: You had a chance to witness the careers of probably, oh, seven to ten Secretaries of State as well as your own. Did all the rest of these fellows put in the kind of schedule that you did? DEAN RUSK: I think--Well, [George Catlett] Marshall did not. Of course, he had Robert [Abercrombie] Lovett as his Undersecretary, who he had worked very closely with during the war when Lovett was Assistant Secretary of War for Air, during World War II. But he had Robert Lovett as his own Undersecretary and Robert Lovett could have been anybody's Secretary of State. So, Marshall was very comfortable in leaving things to Robert Lovett. Now Robert Lovett put in some pretty long hours. But, I think you'll find that, following Marshall, most Secretaries of State put in long hours. RICHARD RUSK: Did you have a Robert Lovett working for you? DEAN RUSK: George [Wildman] Ball was my alter ego as Undersecretary of State, and I had great confidence in him, was entirely comfortable about leaving things in his hands when I went away on a trip. There was some, has been some gossip that when John Foster Dulles or Henry [Alfred] Kissinger went away on a foreign trip they would carry all sorts of policy matters along with them in their vest pocket. Well I didn't do that. When I went on a foreign trip I concentrated solely on the purpose of the trip, the things that were coming up on the trip, and I left everything else to the Acting Secretary of State back in Washington. I remember when the United Nations was meeting in Paris in 1948, the Secretary of State, George Marshall, was heading our delegation. On one occasion, he asked me to prepare a cable referring something back to the Department requesting instructions. And I must have smiled and said something like, "Instructions for you, sir?" or something like that. He said, "Oh, yes, it's the Acting Secretary who has access to the talents and resources of the Department. He is the one that has access to the President and the congressional leaders. He has the, in that Department, the knowledge of what the law says and all those things." He said, "Out here on my own like this, I'm not in a position to--" RICHARD RUSK: This is Marshall talking? DEAN RUSK: Yes. "--to set these policies. I want to know what they think of them in Washington." And I think there's a great wisdom in that. But, no, I had some extraordinarily able people around me in my service there. George Ball, when he left, Nicholas [de Belleville] Katzenbach, who came over--he was serving as Attorney General at the time. He came over to become the Undersecretary of State. People like [William] Averell Harriman and Llewellyn [E.] Thompson [Jr.], Chip--Charles [Eustis] Bohlen, and just a great bunch of people. And I was very fortunate. On the importance of how you state the question, I had picked up something in the Pentagon during the war. There when you write a military staff memorandum, it usually take the form of, first, a statement of the question; second, considerations bearing on the problem, no, facts bearing on the problem; third, considerations; fourth, conclusions; fifth, recommendations. Well, that was the sort of the template, the pattern, of staff memoranda in those days. Well, I've seen many of those memoranda which were written beginning with the recommendations. Then the whole paper would be written backwards. And very often some of the sharpest debate would occur on how you state the question, you see. Because the logical process is not necessarily the way the mind works in a lot of these things. Of course, George Marshall was a great teacher, and one thing which he insisted upon was what he called completed staff work. He wanted you to send in--He said, "Never send me a question unless you send me your proposed answer. Because if you haven't done that then you haven't thought enough about the question, therefore you haven't thought enough about the question to send it to me." And he wanted everything set up so that all he had to do was to sign his name on that piece of paper and then things would begin to happen. "Who's going to do what, how you go about it; everything has to be all set." That's what he told us. RICHARD RUSK: When you came up with your answer, you would specify in detail how you'd implement that answer? DEAN RUSK: If it required negotiation, who was going to do the negotiating. And so that everything was ready to go as soon as he put his name on that paper, you see. Now, and that was good schooling. I remember on one occasion, I took a particular point to teach some of my colleagues in the State Department a little lesson. Iraq was putting great pressure on Kuwait at one point during the mid-sixties, and it was looking like a pretty dangerous thing. Well the Admiral commanding at Norfolk had a little task force of his own out in the Indian Ocean, and we got a message from him saying that he'd ordered task force so-and-so to proceed north toward Kuwait and request instructions. So I sent this down to the Bureau of Inter-Eastern Affairs and asked them for a recommendation. Well, they came back with a pretty complicated paper, in effect, saying that if I thought so-and-so, I should do so-and-so, and if I thought so- and-so, I should do so-and-so. And I sent it back to them and said, "Now look, all that Admiral needs is a compass direction. He can sail north, he can sail east, he can sail south. He can't sail west, because he'd run into Africa. All I want is a compass direction from you." Now that was a little illustration of what George Marshall would call completed staff work. And also a little illustration of Marshall's constant admonition, "Don't fight the problem, try to solve it. Don't pretend the problem is something else, don't just say you wish it had never happened." And, so there was a good deal of detail in the process which could be very important. RICHARD RUSK: Go ahead. DEAN RUSK: When I was Secretary, one thing that I would do from time to time would be to take a few minutes to run in and visit and have a look at some part of the Department that Secretaries almost never visit, and where the people might not even know the Secretary was aware that they were there. For example, I visited the file rooms and the code rooms and the shipping department and once in a while I'd turn up in the general cafeteria, rather than the Secretary's dining room, for lunch, because I wanted to see and also be seen by the people working in those places. Because, after all, they were the people who did so much to keep the day-to-day work going. They were indispensable and yet they were never noticed. And I enjoyed doing that. And so when the time came for me to leave, when your mom and I went down in the elevator to go through the lobby to get in the car that final departure, the lobby was crowded with officers and staff of the Department who bid us goodbye. But eight years is a long time and so I got to know quite a few of them in the course of that-- RICHARD RUSK: Any other honors, special affairs on your behalf as you were leaving office? Didn't LBJ give you a Presidential Medal of Freedom? DEAN RUSK: Well, there was a Medal of Freedom, which is there in the den, which he himself added to by writing on it "with distinction." That Medal of Freedom, that's the highest award to a civilian. But we have on tape that final little goodbye ceremony, the one at the Department of State where he was present. And you get remarks that were made on that occasion. And then, in January 1969, as I was coming up toward leaving, the reporters covering the State Department gave a farewell reception for your mom and me. That was a very pleasant affair. After all, we had been together there, most of us, for eight years. And at that time they presented us with a silver plate which had on it a New Yorker cartoon. It had etched on it a New Yorker cartoon which touched us a bit under those circumstances as we were leaving. The scene of this cartoon was of a stag and a doe in the forest, and the stag was saying to the doe, "Remember dear, if we get through today, we'll be out of season." And that was a very cute and appropriate thing for them to do. But I'd gotten to know many of the reporters quite well, because many times on a Friday afternoon, I would have thirty of so of the key reporters into my rooms up on the eighth floor for a little backgrounder on what had been happening that week and looking ahead to the next week a bit. RICHARD RUSK: Is this something you tried to do every week? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: So, it was more or less regularly scheduled. DEAN RUSK: Right. And we'd have there the wire services and three television network individuals, and some of the key papers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and others. And I found that quite a useful thing and I think the reporters did too. Well, quite late in my term, the Washington Post decided that they didn't like this idea of a backgrounder and so they objected. And so I told the reporters that it's no skin off of me, "If you fellows like it fine, if you don't, that's fine." But the other reporters urged that this practice be continued. Because, you see, with the Washington Post located there in Washington, they had the local staff big enough to sort of scour the government and dig out this information on their own with a sort of competitive advantage. And so this was not just-- RICHARD RUSK: Because they could dig it out on their own and print it for a, with attribution? DEAN RUSK: If they could get it that way. So, we went ahead with it and left it up to the Washington Post as to whether they wanted to have their person there or not. But that was a-- RICHARD RUSK: What did they elect to do, leave their person in? DEAN RUSK: Well, I think maybe they did not turn up for a time or two. I think they had somebody coming in even though they objected to the principle of the whole procedure. RICHARD RUSK: As bitter as things got in Washington during the sixties, were you and the newsmen able to keep on cordial terms? DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think there was a reasonably friendly relationship. I had a personal rule, I had certain personal rules in my dealings with the press that I think the working press appreciated. For example, I would never say to one reporter what I would not say to another reporter who asked me the same question. Now, the working stiffs around the Department appreciated that, but the big name people didn't like that because they wanted special sources of information. But the ordinary reporters--Then I also had a rule that I would never lie to reporters. And I think you can search all my press conferences and all those things, Congressional hearings, pretty thoroughly and I don't think you'll find an instance where I thought one thing and said another. There were times when I had to be silent, when I couldn't go into certain things, but I think it's very bad policy to lie to reporters and so I tried not to do that. Then-- RICHARD RUSK: We ought to have a whole section dealing with press relations. DEAN RUSK: Yes, probably. RICHARD RUSK: Media, you've got enough material there that we could use. DEAN RUSK: Yeah, well I could talk some more about that, but--Then I did another little thing that I think was appreciated. You had there covering the State Department reporters from important out-of-town papers, like the Louisville Courier-Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, people like that. And I sort of tipped off these fellows who were representing papers from a distance, that if their own bosses came to town, their publishers or their editors, these reporters could always bring them in to see me. Well, that didn't take much time, but it really set up these reporters to be able to demonstrate to their own bosses that they could walk right in and see the Secretary of State with their editor or publisher when he came to town. And that proved to be a rather useful thing. But, the press corps covering the State Department was in general, a very able press corps. And they were able to understand and keep track of things much better than a lot of people in government think they can. I had some excellent people in charge of press relations during my time. There was Jim [James Lloyd] Greenfield, who is now one of the top people at the New York Times; there was Bob [Robert James] McCloskey, who had a distinguished career as an ambassador later on, he was very good; and Bob [Robert Joseph] Manning who was editor of Atlantic Monthly for a number of years after he left the Department. One of the important jobs that they did was to teach people in the State Department about the needs of the press. Generally, in the bureaucracy, people in the bureaucracy are likely to say "no comment" to almost every question that comes up. Well, that's not good enough, because the press has a job to do and they have to have the stories. And so we tried to get around that understandable reluctance on the part of the bureaucracy and get them to understand that reporters have a job to do and that we ought to see if we can't help and facilitate their job. But, in any event, in general, I think as far--Although there may have been differences about policy matters, my personal relationship with the reporters in covering the State Department were, on the whole, pretty good. RICHARD RUSK: Well, we ought to do a tape on that sometime. When you last talked about your reactions upon leaving office, your last day in office, the farewell ceremonies, your oral taping for the two Presidential libraries-- DEAN RUSK: Well, I, your mom and I had been invited to the Nixon inauguration. But we'd been through that two or three times, and so we decided rather than go down there and sit in the cold on those Capitol steps that we'd just home and watch it on television. And I very well remember that the moment President Nixon finished his oath of office I just sort of floated like a balloon with exhilaration because it was no longer my problem. If the world burned up it wasn't my fault any more, that kind of thing. RICHARD RUSK: So much for the theorem that all power corrupts; the loss of power corrupts absolutely. DEAN RUSK: That's right. Well some time later I happened to mention this to Lady Bird [Claudia Alta Taylor (Mrs. Lyndon B.)] Johnson. And she smiled and said, "I think you know what I mean, I was sitting next to Lyndon there on the platform at the same moment, and when Nixon finished his oath of office, Lyndon audibly groaned with relief." So-- RICHARD RUSK: In his case, are you sure it was with relief? DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think so, I think so. RICHARD RUSK: I guess so. DEAN RUSK: As soon as the election was over in 1968 and Nixon had been elected, President Johnson told all of us that he wanted the transition from us as the outgoing administration, to the incoming administration, as smooth as possible. And in general that transition worked very well. We gave incoming Secretary of State William [Pierce] Rogers office quarters there in the Department and gave him whatever staff he wanted. And then I would see him from time to time to catch him up on the cable floor and all that kind of thing. And then a day or two before inauguration, your mother and I gave a reception on the eighth floor of the Department of State for all of the outgoing Cabinet and all of the incoming Cabinet. And that, I think, was a very pleasant affair. Good feelings, no bitterness. RICHARD RUSK: Well attended? DEAN RUSK: Everybody was there, the outgoing as well as the incoming. But, on the morning of Inauguration Day, I saw William Rogers to be the new Secretary of State and I gave him a little chit of paper with just listed on it about seven decisions that I told him probably ought to be made in the next twenty- four hours. And he looked at the list and said, "My God, don't you want your job back?" But we tried our best to help Rogers get off to a running start there as Secretary. He was a great gentleman and a fine man, and I personally liked him and still do. And so we tried to make that transition smooth. RICHARD RUSK: And how often were you called upon by Bill Rogers during the transition and afterwards for advice? DEAN RUSK: Well, after he became Secretary of State, only very rarely. It might well be someone else in the Department who wanted me to help them remember a particular situation or something of that sort. But, after all, there was staff there in the Department who knew almost as much about what I knew, said, and did as I did myself. I think they remained available to the new administration. RICHARD RUSK: When Presidential administrations turn over, how much of the State Department turns over as well? DEAN RUSK: There's a mixture of new people and continuing service by some of the people who are already there. But, every presidential appointee in the Department of State is available to a new President to make new appointments if he wishes to. And it's traditional in our system, when there is a, when a new President has been elected, that everyone who holds a position of Presidential appointment sends in his resignation to the President. Now if a person clearly intends to finish with the outgoing President, he sends his resignation to the outgoing President, but if he wishes to let it be known that he will continue to be available, he sends his resignation to the incoming President. And that's a little sign as to what's in people's minds. But, you see, Presiden-tial appointments in the State Department include all those of Assistant Secretary rank, and the Undersecretaries, and Deputy Secretaries, as well as the Secretary, and all Ambassadors. RICHARD RUSK: To which Presidents did you submit your resignation? Well let's see, [Harry S ] Truman succeeded himself back there in'48 so you didn't have that choice did you? DEAN RUSK: No, but in '69 I sent my resignation to Lyndon Johnson, to take effect at noon on Inauguration Day, the moment that Nixon would finish his oath of office. RICHARD RUSK: But as a general rule, don't your Assistant Secretaries for the various departments change? DEAN RUSK: Well, there are career foreign service officers holding a number of those presidential positions, and very often some of those would stay on. If the new administration wants to make a change, they might well bring in some other foreign service officer, but they would send the person holding that post off somewhere as an Ambassador or something of that sort. Very, very rarely do they come in and just fire somebody who's in a, that is, a career officer who's in a presidentially appointed position. RICHARD RUSK: How many positions would you be talking about, say for the Nixon inaugural and transition in the Department of State? DEAN RUSK: Oh, within the Department as distinct from all the Ambassadors abroad, I would think there would be thirty or so Presidential appointees. And an incoming Secretary of State has to use his elbows a bit to be sure that White House staff people don't run away with those appointments. And sometimes there's some tension between the Secretary and some of these political or personnel people in the White House staff who want to get rid of some problems by naming some people to those jobs in the State Department. But the Secretary's first requirement is to be sure that whoever is there will be competent to do the job, and sometimes that creates some problems. RICHARD RUSK: Speaking of the transition, when President Nixon campaigned for election he did not really commit himself to a specific plan, or timetable or policy as far as Vietnam was concerned. DEAN RUSK: No, that's right. RICHARD RUSK: He did not allow himself to become pinned down in that regard. DEAN RUSK: That's right. RICHARD RUSK: Did you have any inkling in January 1969 to what lengths and to what extent he was willing to go? DEAN RUSK: Well, as I indicated in an earlier tape, we had a lot of evidence in the first half of '68 that people at the grass roots of this county had pretty well come to the conclusion that if we could not tell them when this war was going to end, we'd better get out. And so we felt that we were turning over to President Nixon a position in Vietnam where our military position was very strong but where there was not political support for it in the United States. And I was a little surprised that President Nixon took as much time as he did in finally getting us out of Vietnam. I can understand why. He was hoping to leave something behind that was more tolerable from our point of view than the situation which, in fact, resulted. But he simply did not have the public and political support for a significant continuation of the war. And, in all that controversy, I think he got some bum raps on certain points. For example, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were using certain border areas of Cambodia for operations against Vietnam. And when President Nixon went into a very limited area of Cambodia there to get at those base camps, and so forth, there was a tremendous turmoil here in the United States. Matter of fact, we had sort of an under-the-rug understanding with Prince [Norodom] Sihanouk of Cambodia that what we would do--He didn't like the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in Cambodia, himself, and he didn't object to whatever we did up in the northeastern part of Cambodia where there was almost no local population. But he was concerned about anybody hurting Cambodians. And further south there along the border where there was a good deal of population, we occasionally fired on Viet Cong and North Vietnamese camps, troop units, and things like that, but we didn't go in in a major way to inflict a lot of Cambodian casualties. As a matter of fact, when Prince Sihanouk was overthrown during the Nixon Administration, he was on a trip to Moscow and Peking to get their help to get the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese out of Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk was an intelligent, unpredictable, emotional kind of fellow; but, to me, he always seemed to be genuinely concerned about the Cambodian people. I think, myself, that it was a serious loss and setback when he was deposed in Cambodia there, during his trip to Moscow and Peking. RICHARD RUSK: How was it that you became a Fellow for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1969? DEAN RUSK: Well, I felt that I needed some time to slough off all of the problems of the job that I had been holding for eight years and to take some real time to think about what we would do next, as well as to dictate some oral history into the Kennedy and Johnson Presidential Libraries. And so I spoke to [Jacob] George Harrar, my successor as President of the Rockefeller Foundation, about whether the Foundation would be able to provide a fellowship of some sort to give me that additional time, and he did. And I was very thankful for it and that part of it worked out rather well. The Foundation had no obligation to me in that respect, because when I left there as president, all ties were cut and they had no obligation to do it. But under the circumstances, had I tried to go immediately into another job without any kind of rest and breathing space or anything of that sort, it would have been very difficult. RICHARD RUSK: You needed that year and a half. DEAN RUSK: So, we needed that year for, if you like, decompression and to get various things sorted out. But I was not in a strong financial position at that point. The job of Secretary of State had used up whatever savings I'd had from the Rockefeller Foundation days, and so that was a great-- RICHARD RUSK: Your son was at Cornell using up whatever else you had left over. (laughter) DEAN RUSK: Well, somehow we managed that, except for that motorbike. But that was just as simple as that. There was nothing very complicated about it. RICHARD RUSK: Didn't you have a low-grade fever this whole time and an associated health problem that bothered you? Were the doctors ever able to resolve what that might have been? You were bothered by fever. DEAN RUSK: I don't think there was so much of a low-grade fever as a constant ache in my abdominal area. I'd been living with that for about fifteen years or so. The doctors had looked at it at Mayo's at one point, Walter Reed in Washington, Emory Hospital here in Atlanta. They've never been able to find anything to explain it except the idea of some kind of colonic spasm kind of reaction. If it existed, I mean if there is anything mental about it, it was at the subconscious level. But I still have it, still have to live with it. And every time I go to the doctor's or the hospital, they do a little check on it: thus far haven't found anything significant. RICHARD RUSK: Does it flare up when you see me coming with interview pads? DEAN RUSK: No, it doesn't seem to be connected with anything. RICHARD RUSK: I'll be durned. DEAN RUSK: Oh, I must say, around the house here if I find myself looking for something that I can't find, that your mother needs, the frustration of not being able to find it sort of causes my gut to act up a little. So there may be some psychosomatic element involved in this abdominal discomfort that I've had for so long. But, I still don't know the details of how it was that Dean Cowan of the School of Law had the idea and put it through to invite me to come down to the faculty of the law school here. RICHARD RUSK: Was it his idea? DEAN RUSK: It seemed to be clearly his idea. Now that I've seen how the faculty operates in the appointment of new faculty. Someday I'm going to get two or three of the old-timers aside with some highballs and let them describe to me how it was that I was invited to become a member of the faculty here. RICHARD RUSK: I'll be durned. DEAN RUSK: Going back to my-- RICHARD RUSK: Is it sort of a group process that-- DEAN RUSK: Well, the tenured members of the faculty make up an appointments committee. And the faculty acts on every new appointment. And I know that that's not the simplest process in the world, because I've served on that committee all the time I've been here at Georgia. And so I just never inquired into how it was that this invitation to me was issued. But it opened up a lot of things that I--that were valuable to me: the opportunity to teach international law in my own home state of Georgia where I grew up and had many friends, relatives, in the situation where it was relatively pleasant from a climatic point of view. And so we took it on. RICHARD RUSK: If you had had offers from Harvard and Yale come in, would you have possibly gone north for any conceivable position up there? DEAN RUSK: I don't think so, but I'm not going to talk about the offers that did come in because when you turn them down the offer is erased, and so those offers never existed. But, going back to my experience here at the University of Georgia, we've already talked about my getting out around the state, large and small communities, to visit with the people of the state. On campus here, although my teaching work has been in the Law School, I have visited quite frequently with classes in other departments of the University. I visited the Political Science, History, the Business School, Journalism. I even have talked a couple of times to the School of Veterinary Medicine. Whenever these various people get around to a subject on which their students might enjoy a bull session with me, I'll be invited in to sit with them. And I've enjoyed that because it gives me some exposure to undergraduates, and it also fits in with my views that universities ought to be much more interdisciplinary than they are. My general experience has been that negotiating cooperation between two universities or between two disciplines in the same university is just a little more difficult than negotiating with the Russians, because it's some-thing about academia that seems to get in the way. And yet, life is interdisciplinary as a whole. And I'm sometimes disappointed that the different disciplines have so much difficulty in really putting their heads together. RICHARD RUSK: All right, now why is that? DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think it's partly the local internal interest of each discipline on each campus to protect its own pad, and to establish its own position, and to attract its own majors and things of that sort. And we continue to break these disciplines up into smaller and smaller units. Whereas life as a whole is, should be seen as, a whole. And looking ahead to the problems of the next three or four decades, we're going to need more and more universal people: men and women of the sort of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson. But-- RICHARD RUSK: Although the work force itself has become increasingly compartmentalized and specialized. DEAN RUSK: Yes, but at the top where policies are made, you have to have that universal view. We expect our President, our Secretary of State to look at things as a whole, take all elements of a problem into account. But we don't do a very good job in training young people to look at things as a whole. I once proposed on this campus, several years ago, a Ph.D. in nothing at all. The idea behind this was to give some young people, some talented young people, four or five years of an opportunity to draw together the best of the different disciplines and get into the habit of looking at everything as a whole. Because today, if you look at energy, or the environment, or the population explosion, or food, these things are all melted to a single big problem, they're all closely interrelated. Well since they thought I was joking when I made that proposal here, they let me get away with it. If they had realized I was ninety percent serious about it, they probably would have driven me off campus with sticks and stones. RICHARD RUSK: Do you remember the occasion on which you proposed this? DEAN RUSK: No, I forget. It was at some little talk I gave at a dinner or something. RICHARD RUSK: Were you able to initiate any interdisciplinary courses or seminars since you've been to Georgia? DEAN RUSK: Well, our little--We do provide in the Law School that a certain number of units can be taken in other departments of the University. I think that's all to the good. But we also, in the work of the Dean Rusk Center, we've reached out to political science, and economics, and geography, and other departments of the University to try to get them to help focus on particular problems that we study. And that is a sort of a natural thing for something like our Center to do because you just can't get very far in a good many of these questions if you just look at what is strictly the law of the matter. You've got to look at policy, and all sorts of other things. When I was Secretary of State, I, for a time there, would have a luncheon for about fifteen to twenty of the senior officers of the Department, to which I would invite some distinguished scientist from one field or another to come in and tell our people what was going on at the outer edges of this science: what they were pre paring for us down the road in their laboratories, what things we ought to be aware of as we thought about the great policy issues involved in the future. And I found those luncheons extraordinarily worthwhile. And I think the scientists who came in enjoyed doing it and thought it was a very worthwhile thing to do. More and more scientific and technical issues become involved in all sorts of policy questions, and the policy officers have got to be reasonably familiar with at least the general principles of science and technology that might be involved. RICHARD RUSK: These would be luncheons for senior people at the Department of State? Attended by top scientists in various fields? DEAN RUSK: We'd bring them in one by one: one at a particular luncheon, so that we wouldn't, so we at least had a chance to concentrate at that luncheon in a particular field of science. RICHARD RUSK: How often did you do that? DEAN RUSK: Oh, about every two months or so for a period of maybe two or three years. I wish I'd started it much earlier, because I think it turned out to be a very valuable thing. RICHARD RUSK: Did you try to, ever try to start up anything along interdisciplinary lines here at Georgia that you were frustrated upon and unable to achieve because of this fragmented effect: the factors here that discourage interdisciplinary approaches? DEAN RUSK: Well, during those--I mentioned that I had been a member of the committee of the Graduate School to review the graduate work of the University. And the faculty committees which looked at these programs one by one were interdisciplinary committees. And that was a very useful thing to bring to bear the impressions, insights, and attitudes of different disciplines on the work of a particular grad-- END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 DEAN RUSK: When I first took up my appointment here at the University of Georgia, I was named to the graduate faculty from the very beginning. And I used to go to graduate faculty meetings, which was--at that time the entire graduate faculty would be called to a meeting every two months or so, maybe every quarter. I was struck with the fact that at those graduate faculty meetings there was never any attention paid to real ideas, even though we had in the graduate faculty there some of the top people in the country in a good many fields. We'd deal with sort of routine administrative, mechanical matters and everybody was sitting on the edge of their seat to get home as quickly as possible. And that bothered me a bit because there was a lot of brain power in that room that we weren't getting any benefit from. And I tried to start a fairly regular faculty forum to which members of the graduate faculty would be invited, where we would meet maybe every six weeks or so, where one of the members of the graduate faculty would lead a discussion on a particular aspect of his work and we could all discuss it and learn something. But we had one or two such meetings and that was the end of that. Somehow it just didn't pan out. RICHARD RUSK: Well, that's a scary thing for a professor, to attempt to lecture fellow professors. DEAN RUSK: At one point, they--my disenchantment with the meetings of the graduate--they don't have a meeting of the graduate faculty anymore. The graduate council meets from time to time, not the graduate faculty as a whole. But this disenchantment-- RICHARD RUSK: Sort of a steering committee? DEAN RUSK: --led to my attitude on one proposal that was made, and that is that all members of the faculty automatically be made members of the graduate faculty: all the Assistant Professors, the Associate Professors, and everybody else. Well, I opposed that because I felt that if you asked these young assistant and associate professors to--if you name them to the graduate faculty, they would think they have to come to graduate faculty meetings. And from my point of view, a lot of them would be a lot better off going out and playing handball. So I opposed that. But one thing we did a few years ago that I found very interesting; we had a joint faculty seminar, interdisciplinary in character, between Georgia and Georgia Tech, to discuss all the aspects of the energy problem. And I learned a lot from those meetings. Those ran over a period of about two years, and we'd rotate between here and Georgia Tech in alternate meetings. RICHARD RUSK: Just for the faculty? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. And-- RICHARD RUSK: Why did you limit those to faculty? DEAN RUSK: Well, we thought we'd be doing very well to get the faculty involved, and we weren't sure how it was going to work out, so we never expanded it but--and also, that gave us a chance to have a smaller meeting of fifty to seventy-five faculty members from both places. If you have a large crowd and sort of a public meeting, you wouldn't get nearly as far as you would in these private sessions. Well, I learned a lot from that and I think we ought to do more of that kind of thing. But faculty members are so busy, or pretend to be so that it's very difficult for them to get time away. Now here in the last couple of years we've had a little--well you can call it an old man's group: political science and law school, a group of about twelve of us meet periodically to have somebody present a paper. And we get into a discussion of it and there's a chance for a faculty member to try out some ideas on the dogs if he's thinking about maybe writing an article or maybe making a proposal or something he--Those of the members of the group come in there and try it out on the group as a whole. And I found that to be quite interesting and useful. RICHARD RUSK: Do you remember offhand anything that you might have contributed to that group? In terms of ideas, anything stand out? DEAN RUSK: Well, we've discussed relations with the Soviet Union more than once in that group, and we've discussed Law of the Sea problems, and we've discussed East-West trade relations, and things like that. It's been an interesting group. One thing I've done here at the University of Georgia is to get a number of speakers to come here more or less as a courtesy to me: George Ball, and Henry Kissinger, and a good many others. RICHARD RUSK: You got Kissinger for free, did you? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. Orville [Lothrop] Freeman and others have come just because I've asked them. Now that usually requires me to pay off in exchange because they'll cook up places where they want me to come and speak. So I have to pay back on that. And that explains some of my out of town appointments. But, I've also worked with the undergraduate committee on issues as a part of the undergraduate student organization at the student center. And I've helped them get occasional speakers, and get in touch with them and advise them on various things. But I've never been on the lecture circuit; that is, some organized lecture bureau, in effect, selling me to campuses and things of that sort. In the first place, I have all the invitations I can possible handle. And with these lecture bureaus, by the time-- RICHARD RUSK: These are private agents that schedule you for actual-- DEAN RUSK: That's right. And they put out brochures and pictures of all the ponies in their stable and that sort of thing. But if you're on one of those things, then the lecture bureau takes off quite a commission, usually twenty- five percent. By the time you pay that commission and pay your taxes to Uncle Sam, the fellow who does the real work doesn't get all that much out of it. But in any event, I wanted to have complete control of my schedule, so I've never gone that route. I've been approached by most of the lecture bureaus asking me to come under their clamps, and I've always refused to do so. I get far more invitations than I can accept anyhow, and so I've never done that. And I've also not-- RICHARD RUSK: Are most of your colleagues, past and present, involved with those types of bureaus? DEAN RUSK: A number of them are. But in terms of fees, I have probably made more speeches without an honorarium than I have with an honorarium. And, I mean, I almost never charge fees to other philanthropic institutions. Once in a while there'll be an endowed lectureship where I will be invited and that would provide a fee. But I've never been--I've never tried to hold people up for fees. And I've spoken, since I've left office, to things like the International Convention of Kiwanis, and International Convention of Rotary, and people like that without fees. But usually they'll take care of the out-of-pocket costs, expenses. But I haven't been in on the big fee racket. RICHARD RUSK: What about serving as trustees for various groups and serving as members and chairpersons? Are there fees attached to those? DEAN RUSK: No. No. I was for a time the Chairman of the Public Advisory Committee on the Law of the Sea. But that was during the Nixon administration. And I served on the advisory council for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. But I resigned both of those. But I spent a couple of years with the Southern Regional Policy Board, which is a kind of a cooperative association of the southern states on some educational matters. I worked with the Southern Council on Schools and Colleges working on possible improvements in the curriculum on international affairs in our schools and colleges here in the south. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, I've got the list. DEAN RUSK: Yeah. Right. RICHARD RUSK: And it's substantial. I probably ought to go through these one at a time just to-- DEAN RUSK: I've been pulling back from that sort of thing now that I've gotten older. I don't like to have my name associated with something where I cannot actively participate. At the beginning I joined the Committee on the Present Danger, because in the early seventies there seemed to be some moves toward unilateral disarmament and I was rather concerned about that. But then I found that this Committee on the Present Danger was putting out points of view and positions which I could not agree with. And I was not able to go to Washington regularly and take part in their discussions, so I think, rather than have my name associated with those positions, I just dropped out. RICHARD RUSK: Who recruited you for the Committee on the Present Danger? DEAN RUSK: Walt Rostow and Paul [H.] Nitze. I mean Gene Rostow and Paul Nitze, with whom I'd served many years in government. But they got to be--That group got to be much more conservative and much more interested in arms buildup than I was, so-- RICHARD RUSK: And who seriously discussed unilateral disarmament? DEAN RUSK: Well, that was sort of in the political mood in the early seventies. Both parties seemed to be pointing in that direction. And you see, twice I've seen what happens with a unilateral disarmament. Once before World War II, where I'm quite sure that Adolf Hitler went charging down his path and produced World War II because he had contempt for his opposition. He did not believe that Western democracies would fight. And the last thing in the world he thought was that the United States would get into any such war, but even if we did, given the state of our armed forces, that it probably wouldn't make much difference. Then after VJ day, we demobilized almost completely. And then we had all sorts of things, adventures, that Joseph [Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili] Stalin embarked upon. So I'm very skeptical about unilateral disarmament, because when people in other capitols decide what they're going to do, they take that sort of thing into account. When I was a student in Germany, I had a little canoe on the lakes around Potsdam. And one day I pulled this canoe up on a little sandy beach and went into the restaurant there to have lunch. When I came out the canoe was gone. I notified the water police and about an hour later they came puttering up in their motorboat towing my canoe. And they said to me, "Here's your canoe. We have the thief and he will be punished, but we're fining you five marks for tempting thieves." I'd not locked my canoe, see? Well, now, democracies have a problem about tempting thieves. I think we may have encouraged Joseph Stalin in some of his postwar adventures through our very weakness. He looked out across the West, and saw all the divisions melting away. I think its entirely possible that we gave, through our own withdrawal of our last residential combat team from Korea and other signs, we led the Soviets to believe that if the North Koreans went into South Korea that we would not react to it. So we have to be a little careful about that. As a matter of fact, after the Korean business, an American businessman was sitting having lunch in New York next to Mr. [Andrei Yanuarievich] Vyshinsky of the Soviet Union. At one point during the lunch my friend said, "Mr. Vyshinsky, why do you Russians tend to think that somehow the United States is going to attack the Soviet Union, you know very well that the United States is not going to attack the Soviet Union." And he said, "Well we don't know how to understand you people on something like that." He said, "Look at Korea. You did everything you could to tell us you were not interested in Korea, and then when the North Koreans went in there you put your troops in there." He said, "We can't trust you Americans." RICHARD RUSK: That is funny. How do spell that fellow's name? DEAN RUSK: V-Y-S-H-I-N-S-K-Y. RICHARD RUSK: What was his position with the Soviet Union? DEAN RUSK: Well he was then at the United Nations, but he had been Foreign Minister. He was also the Chief Prosecutor in those purge trials that Stalin put on during the thirties. But he--Well, I think that's about as much as-- DEAN RUSK: I was very enthusiastic about the White House Fellows Program that was invented during the mid-sixties. Actually, it was an idea that John [W.] Gardner came up with. And each of the--They had about fifteen or so of these White House Fellows, and the idea was that these younger people would be brought in from various lines of work and given a year's full exposure to the way government actually operates, at the top. RICHARD RUSK: In the White House? DEAN RUSK: Yes. Well, no, in the Cabinet departments as well. And then they would go on back to their private life. The idea was not that we would use that to recruit people for government. And I took that program seriously. And in the case of my own White House Fellows, I would have them very close to me in my own office. They sat in frequently on my talks with visiting foreign ministers and went with me on some foreign trips. They got a chance to see the business from the top. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. And then after I left government and came back down here in Georgia, I served on the regional committee for the selection of White House Fellows. I finally dropped off that because of the time and energy, but that was a program that I thought was very--But the success of that program depends entirely on how seriously people at the top of the government take it. Because if they just stick these White House Fellows down in the bowels of the bureaucracy somewhere, and let them mark time there, then there's not much can come of it. But if they're really exposed to what goes on, it makes a big difference. Peter [Frederic] Krogh, who is now dean at Georgetown for all international studies was one of my White House Fellows. And I gave him quite a workout. As a matter of fact, I remember on one occasion, a day that made me particularly popular in Congress, I was picketed by about three hundred homosexuals down in front of the State Department carrying signs saying "Rusk Unfair to Homosexuals." Well, I sent Peter Krogh down there to the front door of the Department to negotiate with these people, talk to them. Well, that was--on that day I was very popular on Capitol Hill. Incidentally on that-- RICHARD RUSK: Who provided the funds for the White House Fellowships? Government? DEAN RUSK: The government, but they were relatively insignificant in terms of cost. I think the government did, yes. RICHARD RUSK: Did the program continue? DEAN RUSK: Yes, yes. But it withered away a little during the seventies because the top people in government would not really take these White House Fellows into their own confidence and give them a full exposure to the top of the government. But my hope is that it will bounce back into a real program. I think it was a very valuable program. RICHARD RUSK: And the Wilson Fellowships or the-- DEAN RUSK: Well I served for a time as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson Center of International Scholars in Washington. I enjoyed that, but these trips to Washington just got to be too much, and I dropped off that. But otherwise I did not, beyond that I did not serve on a selection board for Fellows themselves. I have been chairman of the university committee for the selection of Rhodes Scholars, but we haven't had much success. We've nominated some people to the state selection committee, and we've had three or four of our people go on to the regional board, but I don't think, since I've been here, that we've had a Rhodes Scholar, so my work there has not been all that distinguished. We've had some very good candidates, but--when I became sixty- seven I accidentally became aware of the fact that it would no longer be lawful for state of Georgia tax money to be used in paying my salary, because there was a state law. I think that the age is now seventy on that. But from that time on, private money has been used to finance my chair, my situation. Matter of fact, I think it was private money that had been used for that purpose all along, but-- RICHARD RUSK: The source of funding for your chair came from what, now? DEAN RUSK: Came from a private foundation. See, my chair was called the Samuel H. Sibley Professorship, named after a very distinguished Georgia lawyer and judge, and a cousin to Mr. John [Adams] Sibley who was one of the great lawyers, now in his nineties and-- RICHARD RUSK: It was vacant when you were asked to come here, or was it created to bring you here? DEAN RUSK: I think it largely was created for that purpose. And certainly the foundation grants were originated for that purpose. And so--see I didn't--University of California's Law School in San Francisco, Hastings School of Law, they as a matter of policy, have a commission from the state to bring distinguished faculty in from all over the country who have retired elsewhere, and keep them on, bring them to the faculty of Hastings Law School for a period of three, four, five years, so long as they are in good health and active and so forth. Well, that's been a great boon to Hastings School of Law. We've lost some very distinguished faculty here because we did not have the private funds to keep them on because of this state rule, and, oh, I think that--You see, the automatic age limit for retirement is really for the convenience of admin-istrators. Because it's very hard for a Dean or a President to say to one man, "Sorry old chap, but you're through," and say to another man, "Well, you're fit and fine and we'd like for you to go on for a while." That crucifies the administrator. And so this notion of an automatic retirement age is basically for the protection of administrators. RICHARD RUSK: Didn't you tell me one time that you'd picked out two or three friends on the faculty that would keep an eye on you and to let you know if your time had come? DEAN RUSK: Yes, when they-- RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever hear from those people? DEAN RUSK: No. When they kept insisting that I stay on well beyond the normal retirement age, I did speak to a couple of my colleagues and told them, for Heaven's sakes to speak to me if they think I'm beginning to break up, because I don't want to--I didn't want to inflict on students somebody who was clearly around the bend. But, that has not happened and--But I'm not teach-ing classes any more. I stopped that when I forced myself to. RICHARD RUSK: The law school--go ahead, unless you're done with that question. DEAN RUSK: Well the same thing tends to apply in government, but there occasionally you make exceptions. For example, Averell Harriman was active well beyond anybody's conceivable retirement age. And I broke every law in the book, I think, with regard to Marjorie [M.] Whiteman, who was one of the officers in our legal advisor's office who was working on this fourteen-volume digest of international law. When I got there, or soon after I got there, she was going to pass the age of seventy-two or something, and I kept her on in order to finish that digest. I suppose I might have broken every law on the books, but I haven't been sent a bill for it by the General Accounting Office. But I remember she finished up the last volume about four o'clock one morning and she retired that same morning at nine o'clock in my office. And she turned to me and said, "You'll never see me again." RICHARD RUSK: I'll be durned. DEAN RUSK: And then she went off to the Midwest to settle on a little farm. But we did get her to come down here and visit the law school, and she was perky and feisty and very stimulating and interesting to the law school. But she did a great job on that digest of international law. RICHARD RUSK: While we're on the subject, they say that wisdom comes with old age. But in your dealings with government leaders around the globe, do you recall cases where clearly old age had exceeded whatever wisdom that might come from that? DEAN RUSK: Well, I'm convinced that that is something that cannot be measured by the number of years. There are people who are prematurely old at the age of thirty. There are others--I mean one of the youngest minds and spirits in this country right now is still Averell Harriman, and he's past ninety. I'm quite sure that this varies with individuals. I did meet some people who seemed to me to be yielding to the passage of the years: [Francisco] Franco of Spain, [Antonio de Oliveira] Salazar in Portugal. There are a number of those that seem to be clearly not completely with it in terms of the situation in the modern world. But on the other hand, there was old Conrad Adenauer, Chancellor of Germany, who was very much up to his job even though he was into his eighties. DEAN RUSK: I suppose it depends quite a bit on the political structures themselves as to whether or not they could get maximum mileage out of these old guys, and yet--Well, when I was at the Rockefeller Foundation, we were aware of the fact that there have been people carrying heavy policy responsibilities with serious health problems: [Thomas] Woodrow Wilson lying there paralyzed while his wife was trying to run the Cabinet. And then [Robert] Anthony Eden and Winston [Leonard Spencer] Churchill, and John Foster Dulles, and Dwight Eisenhower and others. And so we pulled together a group of people to take a look at as to whether there is anything that could be examined on the connection between physical disability and policy judgment on the part of people in high office. But the people we talked to about it felt that there was no way to isolate out that particular factor, and therefore all you could do would be to guess, to surmise and do a pretty amateurish job. This was stimulating because I'd been a close friend of John Foster Dulles and I went down to call on him in the hospital about ten days before his death. He knew he was dying and-- RICHARD RUSK: He died in office, didn't he? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: Cancer? DEAN RUSK: Yeah, that's right. He didn't die until actually after he had resigned from office. RICHARD RUSK: Christian [Archibald] Herter had to take over. DEAN RUSK: Christian Herter took over for him. But, Foster Dulles and I talked about a good many things such as his papers and various things he had on his mind. And we talked about a number of policy questions, and he made one remark that I found very intriguing. He said, "You know, Dean, I would not have made certain decisions about Suez had I not been sick at the time." Well, under those circumstances I couldn't sort of just clap my hands and say, "Well, gee, Foster which decisions were those?" And he didn't volunteer the details. But it did raise this intriguing question as to what effect health might have on high policy decisions. Now in the case of President Kennedy, I saw him hundreds upon hundreds of times in the most diverse circumstances, and not once did he ever, did I ever hear him complain about his back. Not once did I ever hear, did I ever have the impression that I was in the presence of someone who was under any form of sedation. And so these stories about his health problems seen to me not really to have intruded on his performance of his job as President. RICHARD RUSK: When you factor in fatigue, as well as possible poor health, did you fellows ever take a look at that? I know you had some question about it in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. DEAN RUSK: It's possible that those things make a difference. But it's very hard to study that particular point because you can't isolate that from all the other factors that were involved. RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever notice LBJ doing things that might have seemed to you a bit questionable, possibly related to fatigue or matters of health? DEAN RUSK: No, I think one can say that LBJ was a man in a great hurry. He wanted to-- RICHARD RUSK: You've told me this. DEAN RUSK: Yeah. And this was constantly related to his own view that he did not know whether he would be alive the next day, and when he made a decision he wanted to execute it. Now, he would take all the time he wanted to before making a decision, but when he made it, he wanted it executed immediately. And that made him a somewhat hard taskmaster. The rest of us accepted that because he was hardest of all upon himself, but he drove himself unmercifully. I don't know how he survived the job. He had that massive heart attack during the fifties when he was, in effect, given up for dead there. Blood pressure went down to zero. And how he survived the job, I'll never know. He must have had extra supplies of adrenaline. I think most politicians have that extra surplus of adrenaline in them; otherwise they wouldn't be in the business. RICHARD RUSK: Just from the point of view of looking at a President's photographs from the time he took office until the time he leaves, there's a terrific aging process that takes place there. DEAN RUSK: Oh, it's a man-killing job. It's a miracle of our constitutional system that anyone ever steps forward to want to be President, because it really is a demanding job, and the responsibilities are so awesome in terms of what happens, not only to our own country, but to the rest of the world that--you see, that's particularly true beginning with Eisenhower's second term. See, in the mid-fifties, about the time he entered his second term, a full and nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union became operationally possible. So every President from that time forward has had to think about something that other Presidents have had not to consider, and that is the possibility of the virtual destruction of the United States and most of the rest of the human race at the same time. So that-- RICHARD RUSK: Sure helps-- DEAN RUSK: So that damned little black box that goes around with the President wherever he goes is really a burden around his neck. That's a terrible thing. And I had a little of that myself, because I always had to be in communication with that black box, in effect. So when I would go out to play a round of golf, there would be a security man running along in the rough beside me with a radio communication. RICHARD RUSK: I remember. DEAN RUSK: And that causes you to slice and hook a little more often than you normally would. Oh dear! RICHARD RUSK: What about the wartime decision-making and the fact that wartime decision making involves loss of life, involves destruction of property, all types of things that you don't normally get into in peacetime decision making. Now what effect do those pressures have? DEAN RUSK: Well, it can't help but have an effect. Except for the men and their families who actually carried the battle in Vietnam, I don't know anyone who agonized over Vietnam more than Lyndon Johnson. Every casualty just took a little piece out of him. And that was such a burden to him-- RICHARD RUSK: How did you know this? DEAN RUSK: Well, I could just sense it, tell it in his reactions, and look at the lines growing on his face. We couldn't break him of the habit of getting up at five o'clock in the morning, even though he'd been doing his evening work until one o'clock at night. We couldn't break him of the habit of running down to the operations room around five o'clock to check on casualties in Vietnam, and I'm sure that he really agonized over this. But, I've been on both ends of the responsibilities of command. I've been on the receiving end in my day, and I've been on the giving end, on the other end in Washington and it's not easy. RICHARD RUSK: Did Lady Bird ever used to talk about it at all? DEAN RUSK: Not really, Lady Bird did not intrude into foreign policy questions. Now, she might have privately with Lyndon, in the family there, but never with any of us. She had her own interests that she was pursuing in environment, beautification, and things like that. But she was always supportive and helpful. She was a great lady in every sense of the word. RICHARD RUSK: It's not a subject that's often discussed. I notice these fellows in their memoirs never talk about that. Of course they really can't. I mean what can you say about that other than its.. DEAN RUSK: Well it's--if you-- RICHARD RUSK: But I'm convinced that it's a very influential factor. DEAN RUSK: If you try to talk about it you immediately appear to be indulging in self-pity. RICHARD RUSK: Right. It's not the kind of thing you fellows could even talk about. DEAN RUSK: And you just don't want to get into that. Another thing that is interesting, if you read through all these memoranda, the paperwork put out in government, very rarely will you find moral and ethical considerations discussed at length. Well, part of that is that people don't wear their deep moral judgments on their sleeves. It's there; these things make a difference. But there's a reluctance to talk about things that people feel very deeply, so you don't have that kind of thing spread all over the official record. Another thing about the official record I think I mentioned the other day is that the actual documentation itself is only a fraction of the story. These documents are surrounded by an enormous amount of discussion among the individuals who are responsible for policy, and those, a lot of that discussion never appears in the official record. And so the historians have a kind of limited access to what really was in people's minds. RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, I meant to ask you earlier, have you ever gone toe to toe with any of these revisionist historians on the post-World War II period and our responsibility for the Cold War, and their assumption of responsibility? Is this something you've ever debated with any of these fellows? Because it's a fairly pervasive school of thought. DEAN RUSK: I haven't taken them on in any formal debate although I've made passing comments about them quite frequently. But, I mean, I remember reading a five-hundred-page book written by a professor at Vanderbilt (I could dig out his name one of these days) in which he was trying to lay responsibility for the cold war on the United States. And he went to the point of saying that it was South Korea that attacked North Korea in 1950. Well, I went through this; this was one of the first of the revisionist historians. And I went through that book and found simple errors of fact on every page. I have not run across any of the revisionist historians who have dealt seriously with the fact that we disarmed ourselves just after V-J [Victory-Japan] Day. And it was during that period when Joseph Stalin looked out across the west and embarked upon all those adventures that, in fact, produced the cold war. So I have some problems with the revisionist historians. RICHARD RUSK: You would have argued it with people like [George Frost] Kennan at government levels, I guess, so-- DEAN RUSK: Well, Kennan was not a revisionist historian when he was in government, not at all. But the revisionist historians seems to me to lack a sense of context, and some of them a lack of just plain intellectual integrity The other school that drives me up the wall is the so-called psycho-historians This relatively new group of historians who think they can rewrite history by psychoanalyzing the actors along the way. Whether it was Napoleon [Bonaparte] or Louis XIV, whoever it was. Well, this notion that you can peer into somebody's psychology at great distances of space and time and make any sense is, to me, very amateurish. I don't know whether I ever told you that a young fellow just out of Harvard, still wet behind the ears, wrote an article about me in which he said that my view of the Presidency was due to the fact that I needed a father figure because I considered my own father to have been a failure. RICHARD RUSK: He wrote this about you? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: I'll be darned. DEAN RUSK: All I'd done was to read the first Section of Article Two of the Constitution. And it's the kind of thing that is just-- RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall his name? DEAN RUSK: Oh, I could run across it and pick it up, but while we're-- RICHARD RUSK: That probably deserves a footnote or two. DEAN RUSK: When I joined President Kennedy I decided, and announced at that time, that I would never write memoirs, and there were many reasons for that. I wanted foreign leaders to know that if they wanted to talk to me in confidence, they could do so and I wouldn't rush out and start writing books about it. I also remember a remark once made by George Marshall when he was Secretary. Somebody asked him about this. He said, "No," said, "If I were to write memoirs, I would owe it to myself as a matter of integrity to tell the whole truth. But if I were to tell the whole truth, I would injure a great many people, including myself. Therefore I will leave this to the historians." RICHARD RUSK: Can you think of-- DEAN RUSK: Out in the China-Burma-India theatre during World War II, for purposes of India and Burma we were under British command. The British Chiefs of Staff were the executive agent for the combined Chiefs of Staff in that theatre and that, in effect, meant that we were under Churchill's command. Well, in 19-, late '43 or early '44, we got a direction from London to launch a long- range penetration group into Burma. This was one of those Wingate-type of operations. About three thousand men were going to march into Burma and be supplied by air and horse around there for several weeks and then come on back. They were not to take any strategic objectives, and so far as we could see this operation would have no perceptible impact upon the war itself. So, as Chief of War Plans, I gave this operation the code name of "Pinprick." But when that got back to London, out came a rocket from Churchill saying, "Change the name of Pinprick to Grapple." I've often thought that maybe one of the differences between Churchill and me was the difference between "grapple" and "pinprick." Oh dear! RICHARD RUSK: When you first came to Georgia, that was 1971. There's been quite a bit of change with the Law School and with the University itself. Do you care to comment on any of those changes and in particular some of the problems that the Law School might have had over these years. DEAN RUSK: I was very fortunate in arriving at the Law School in the middle of an extraordinary leap forward in the quality of its work. Oh, thirty years ago there might have been eight members on the faculty at the Law School here at Georgia. But sometime during the sixties, long before I arrived here, a group of law school alumni over in Atlanta, particularly people like Carl Sanders, who later became governor of Georgia, and others decided that a major effort should be made to move the Law School into the front ranks. And so I got the full benefit of that. That was a determination from the State Legislature all the way through the Regents, to the University here, and to the Law School itself to get going on it. So I was here during a very stimulating upswing in the Law School. We now, I think, are among the best law schools in the country. Certainly among the very good ones. Our law library is among the twenty best in the country, and we've had some very good success in recruiting fine professors. We've stolen professors away from Michigan and Harvard and other places. So it's been a very exciting time to be-- RICHARD RUSK: Who from Michigan? DEAN RUSK: Richard [Vance] Wellman was one of those, for example. He was a top man in such things as estate planning, wills; also has taught property and other courses. RICHARD RUSK: How does your international law division, department, compare in size and quality with what the rest of the nation offers? DEAN RUSK: Well, I think now we have a very strong group with Louis [Bruno] Sohn from Harvard, Tom [Thomas J.] Schoenbaum from North Carolina and Tulane, Gabriel [M.] Wilner, who is not as well-known publicly as he deserves to be, but he was director of studies at the Hague Academy of International Law for a period and had a lot of work at the United Nations and is really a first class lawyer. He's very familiar with European law, [a] good man in comparative law. And so we've got a pretty strong group here now. We give a number of courses and seminars in international law. But when I advise individual students, I advise then not to take so many of those that they find themselves neglecting other major fields of the law such as corporations, and taxation, and finance management, and all those things, because to be an international lawyer you have to start by being a lawyer. And so, I personally feel that if anyone really wants to specialize in international law, they ought to start by the basic three-year law school program to be well rounded as a lawyer. And then maybe take a fourth year of specialization somewhere such as at the free University of Brussels Is, where they give a year-long program both in English and in French, which is very good, or in London or Harvard or somewhere else. As far as the first three-year law program is concerned, my hunch is that there are about, well at least, fifty law schools in the country who do more or less an equivalent job for those three years. Now when you get into the graduate level of law, then some of them begin to stick their heads up above the crowd, such as Harvard, Michigan, Berkeley, places like that. But Georgia is clearly in one of those in that top echelon of law schools; however you measure them around the country. Of course funds for a law school are very important in maintaining a really good faculty and in providing reasonable fellowship opportunities for law students who simply cannot afford long training. After all, they've been through four years of college already before they head for law school. Well, [James] Ralph Beaird, particularly, since he's been Dean, has done a fine job in mobilizing funds for the Law School. He's greatly increased private giving to the law school. He looked over the record and found that there were a number of gifts that had been made to the University for the Law School which somehow never trickled around to the Law School. RICHARD RUSK: Can you be a little more explicit about that, or is that something I be asking? DEAN RUSK: No, I just don't have the information about that. And probably shouldn't volunteer. END OF SIDE 2